Various types of continuous business forms are available for being fed to the printing means of business machines such as typewriters, tabulators, mini-computers, or the like. Such forms may be in the nature of manifolding assemblies including superimposed paper webs interleaved with carbon transfer sheets. Typical of such assemblies are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,907,585 and in British Pat. No. 1,376,447 which include rows of spaced marginal feed holes. Many of the continuous business forms are used with office computers and terminal printers and are intended to be used for relatively short runs. When such forms or assemblies are positioned in the print unit of the computer, the feed holes at opposite marginal edges thereof engage the feed pins of a pair of tractor pin feed units at the outfeed side of the print unit. Therefore, as the tractors are driven, the stationery assemblies advance into and past the print unit. However, it becomes necessary to position the tractors several inches downstream of the printing position in the direction of feed through the machine in order to effectively and accurately advance the assembly. As a consequence, each time a fresh continuous assembly to be printed is loaded into the front print unit, one form length at the leading end of the assembly is wasted since it is disposed slightly downstream of the print position in order to engage with the tractor units. Hence, such form length at the leading edge of the assembly must be discarded at the end of the print run.
This waste each time a new pack of forms is loaded into the print unit is compounded when relatively short lengths of the forms are printed, especially if a single form length only is to be printed because during each printing operation a partly used pack is inserted and this entails losing one form length at each reloading.